I'd always known it was possible to do overhead paging with Asterisk. Now I've finally tackled it. I purchased a Bogen amp and speakers and installed 5 flushmount speakers and one bullhorn for the warehouse.

Configuring Asterisk was pretty easy. I had to add a sound card to the server, but that was easy enough.

What wasn't easy was the fact that my acpi settings were causing huge issues with the sound card. The audio would repeat the last 3 seconds of a page forever. It took me 3 days to figure out that it was caused by the acpi=ht setting in lilo.conf - I basically had an IRQ conflict. Things went much smoother after that.

I then added a second sound card to the system. I know what you're thinking 'What was he thinking?!?' but really there's a method to my madness. Configuring Alsa to work with both cards wasn't too awfully tough. I had to specify in the Asterisk alsa.conf for

input_device=hw:0,0
output_device=hw:0,0

That way it used sound card 1. I then installed a slimserver and configured a stream. I used mpg123 to connect to that stream and told it to use the second sound card with the option '-a hw:1,0 '